*Source: PSS vol 5*

Alongside the new famine, the old, now protracted, trade-industrial crisis drags on still, having thrown tens of thousands of jobless workers onto the streets. The need among them is terribly great, and all the more striking is the completely different attitude of both the government and educated "society" toward this need and toward the need of the peasants. There are no attempts whatsoever—neither from public institutions nor from the press—to determine the number of needy workers and the degree of their need even with the same degree of approximation as is employed in determining peasant need. No systematic measures to organize aid for starving workers.

What accounts for this difference? We believe: least of all from the fact that the need of workers, so to speak, emerges less visibly, manifests itself in less striking forms. True, urban residents not belonging to the working class know little about how the factory workers now suffer, crowding ever more into basements, attics, and hovels, eating even less than usual, pawning the last scraps of household goods to moneylenders; true, the increase in the number of vagrants and beggars, visitors to lodging houses and inmates of prisons and hospitals attracts no special attention, because after all "everyone" has grown so accustomed to the fact that in a large city the lodging houses and every den of hopeless misery must be overflowing; true, unemployed workers are in no way attached to place, like peasants, and either disperse of their own accord to different corners of the state, seeking employment, or are sent "home" by the administration, which fears the accumulation of the unemployed. But, despite all this, everyone who comes into contact with industrial life observes firsthand, and everyone who follows public life knows from the newspapers, that unemployment is growing and growing.

No, the reasons for this difference lie deeper: one must seek them in the fact that rural famine and urban unemployment belong to completely different modes of the economic life of the country, are conditioned by completely different relationships between the class of exploiters and the class of the exploited. In the countryside the relations between these two classes are generally extraordinarily entangled and complicated by a multitude of transitional forms, when agricultural economy is combined now with usury, now with wage labor, and so on and so forth. And it is not agricultural wage workers who starve—the opposition of their interests to those of landowners and wealthy peasants is clear to all and in considerable degree to the workers themselves—but small peasants starve, peasants whom it is customary to consider (and who consider themselves) independent proprietors, merely by chance sometimes falling into one or another "temporary" dependence. The immediate cause of famine—crop failure—is a disaster, in the eyes of the masses, of purely elemental character, God's permission. And because these crop failures accompanied by famine have been occurring since time immemorial, legislation has long been forced to reckon with them. Long ago there existed (mainly on paper) entire codes of popular sustenance, prescribing a whole system of "measures." And however little these measures, borrowed for the most part from the times of serfdom and the dominance of patriarchal natural economy, correspond to the needs of the modern epoch, nevertheless each famine sets in motion an entire administrative and zemstvo apparatus. And this apparatus, even with all the desire of persons in power, finds it difficult, almost impossible to do without many-sided aid from these detested "third parties," intelligentsia striving to raise a "commotion." On the other hand, the connection of famine with crop failure and the beaten-down condition of the peasant—not aware (or dimly aware to the utmost degree) that only the intensifying oppression of capital in conjunction with the predatory policy of the government and landowners has brought him to such ruin—lead to the fact that the starving feel themselves completely helpless and display not only no excessive, but even absolutely no "demandingness."

And the lower the level of consciousness of oppression in the oppressed class and of demandingness toward the oppressors, the more there appear among the propertied classes persons inclined toward philanthropy, the less relatively is there resistance to this philanthropy from local landowners directly interested in peasant poverty. If one takes into account this undoubted fact, then it will turn out that the intensification of landowner resistance, the intensification of cries about the "demoralization" of the peasant, and finally the adoption by a government "stuffed" with such sentiments of purely military measures against the starving and against philanthropists—all this clearly testifies to the complete decline and decomposition of that original, patriarchal, consecrated for centuries and supposedly insurmountably stable village order that was so admired by the most ardent Slavophiles, the most conscious reactionaries, and the most naive "populists" of the old-time variety. We social-democrats were always accused—by populists of artificially transferring the concept of class struggle to those areas where it is entirely inapplicable; by reactionaries of fanning the flames of class hatred and inciting "one part of the population against another." Without repeating dozens of times the answer already given to these accusations, we shall remark only that the Russian government goes ahead of us all in evaluating the depth of class struggle and in the energy of measures flowing from such evaluation. Everyone who came into contact in some way with the public that set out in famine years to "feed" the peasants—and who among us did not come into contact with it?—knows that it was impelled to do so by simple human compassion and pity, that any sort of "political" designs were utterly foreign to it, that propaganda of the ideas of class struggle left this public completely unmoved, that the arguments of Marxists in their heated war with populist views on the countryside did not convince this public. What does class struggle have to do with it? they said. Simply peasants are starving, and one must help them.

But those whom the arguments of Marxists did not convince may perhaps be convinced by the "arguments" of Mr. Minister of Internal Affairs. No, they are not "simply starving"—he proclaims to the philanthropists—and without the permission of the authorities one cannot "simply" help, for this develops demoralization and an unjustifiable demandingness. To intervene in the provisioning campaign means to intervene in those divine and police ordinances which ensure to messrs. landowners workers willing to labor for next to nothing, and to the treasury ensure the collection of taxes, gathered through extortion. And whoever carefully reflects upon the Sipyagin circular will be compelled to say to himself: yes, in our countryside a social war is underway, and, as with any war, one cannot deny the belligerents the right to inspect the cargo of ships bound for enemy ports even under a neutral flag! The difference from other wars is only that here one side, obliged to work eternally and starve eternally, does not even fight at all, but is only being fought upon… for now.

In the sphere of factory-plant industry the existence of this war has long ago been subject to no doubt whatsoever, and the "neutral" philanthropist has no need for circulars to explain that, without asking the ford (i.e., permission of the authorities and messrs. factory owners), one ought not venture into the water. As far back as 1885, when even barely noticeable socialist agitation among workers could not be in question, even in the central district, where workers stand closer to the peasantry than in the capital, the industrial crisis so powerfully charged the factory atmosphere with electricity that explosions constantly occurred now here, now there. Philanthropy under such circumstances is condemned to impotence from the outset, and therefore remains a random and purely individual matter of certain persons, acquiring no shadow of social significance.

Let us note one more peculiarity in society's attitude toward famines. Until quite recently, it could be said without exaggeration that among us there prevailed the view that the entire Russian economic, indeed even state, structure was held up only by the mass of peasantry possessing land and independently managing it. To what degree this view penetrated even into advanced circles of thinking people, least of all inclined to swallow the official flattery, was shown most strikingly to all by the memorable book by Nicholas—it, published after the famine of 1891–1892.{110} The ruin of a vast number of peasant farms seemed to everyone such an absurdity, such an impossible leap into nothingness, that the necessity for the broadest possible aid, capable of truly "healing the wounds," became an almost universal watchword. And once again it was no one other than Mr. Sipyagin who took upon himself the task of dispelling the last illusions. On what indeed does "Russia" rest, how do the agricultural and trade-industrial classes live, if not on the ruin and destitution of the people? To attempt to heal this "wound" not merely on paper—why, that is a crime of state!

Mr. Sipyagin will undoubtedly contribute to the spread and strengthening of that truth: that, besides class struggle of the revolutionary proletariat against the entire capitalist order, there is and can be no other means either against unemployment and crises, or against those Asiatic-wild and cruel forms of expropriation of the petty producer which this process has assumed in our country. The masters of the capitalist state care as little about the mass victims of famine and crisis as the locomotive cares about those it crushes on its way. Dead bodies brake the wheels, the train stops, it may even (under overly energetic engineers) leave the rails in the process, but in any case it continues, after this or that delay, on its way. You hear of the famine death and ruin of tens and hundreds of thousands of small proprietors, but at the same time you hear too of the progress of our native agriculture, of successful conquest of foreign markets by Russian landowners who sent an expedition of Russian agricultural experts to England, of the expansion of sales of improved implements and the spread of grass-seeding and so forth. For the masters of Russian agriculture (like all capitalist masters) the intensification of ruin and famine is nothing more than a small temporary delay, which they scarcely notice if the starving do not force them to notice. Everything proceeds as before,—even speculation in the sale of lands by that part of proprietors who are formed by wealthy peasants.

Take, for instance, Buguruslan district of Samara province, announced as "unreliable as to harvest." That means the ruin of the mass of peasantry and famine have reached their highest degree here. But the disaster to the masses not only does not hinder, but seems even to promote the strengthening of the economic position of the bourgeois minority of peasantry. Here is what we read about the same district in a September correspondence of the *Russkie Vedomosti*{111} (No. 244):

"Buguruslan district of Samara province. The curse of the day for us is the universal rapid rise in land prices and the enormous speculation in land caused by this rise. Only 15–20 years ago magnificent valley lands went here for 10–15 rubles per desyatina: there were localities remote from the railroad where only three years ago a price of 35 rubles per desyatina was considered high, and only for the very best land with a magnificent manor house and market was once paid 60 rubles per desyatina. Now even for the worst land they give 50–60 rubles, and for the best lands the price has risen to 80 and even to 100 rubles per desyatina. Speculation caused by this rise in land prices is of two kinds: first, it is the purchase of land for immediate resale (there are cases where land was bought at 40 rubles and a year later resold to local peasants at 55 rubles); ordinarily it is landowners who sell—those who either have no desire or no longer have time to deal with the delays and formalities of selling land to peasants through the Peasant Bank; it is merchant-capitalists who buy and resell to the same local peasants. Second, all sorts of numerous middlemen engage in foisting upon peasants from distant provinces (chiefly from Little Russia) all kinds of inconvenient land, for which they receive from estate owners decent percentages (from 1 to 2 rubles per desyatina). From what has been said it is already evident that the main object of land speculation is the peasant, and on his hunger for land is based all this unimaginable and inexplicable by simple economic reasons jump in land prices; of course, railroads played a role too, but not such as to be primary, since the chief buyer of land remains the peasantry, for whom the railroad is a factor far from primary."

These tenacious "enterprising peasants," greedily investing their "savings" (and plunder) in land purchases, will inevitably finish off those of the impoverished peasants who still survived the present famine.

If for bourgeois society the means against the ruin and starvation of destitute peasants is the purchase of land by wealthy peasants, then the means against crisis, the overstocking of the market with industrial products, is the search for new markets. The groveling press (*Novoe Vremya* No. 9188) is ecstatic over the successes of new trade with Persia, lively discussion is being conducted about commercial prospects in Central Asia and especially in Manchuria. Iron works and other industrial magnates rub their hands joyfully, hearing of the revival of railroad construction. It has been decided to build major lines: Petersburg–Vyatka, Bologoe–Sedletz, Orenburg–Tashkent; the government has guaranteed railroad loans totaling 37 million (for the societies of the Moscow-Kazan, Lodz, and South-Eastern roads), lines are proposed: Moscow–Kyshtym, Kamyshin–Astrakhan, and the Black Sea. Starving peasants and unemployed workers can console themselves: government money (if the treasury can scrape together more money) will not, of course, be spent "unproductively" (cf. the Sipyagin circular) on relief, no, it will pour into the pockets of engineers and contractors—like those virtuosos of theft from the treasury who year after year stole and stole in Nizhny during the construction of the Sormovo dam and who only now have been sentenced (by way of exception) by a session of the Moscow Judicial Chamber{112} in Nizhny Novgorod.[145]